Sam Newman reveals his new plan to drown out Welcome to Country on podcast by right-wing hosts Avi Yemini and Rukshan Fernando

Former football great Sam Newman has now called on fans to drown out the Welcome to Country ceremonies by singing the We Are One chorus from alternative anthem I Am Australian.

The new call comes just 24 hours after he sparked anger over his demand that the widely performed Indigenous greeting be booed by Australians.

But when he appeared as a guest on the right-wing counterculture podcast “The Opposition” with Avi Yermini and Rukshan Fernando, Newman reversed his earlier idea.

“And when all the nonsense and bullshit of Welcome to Country starts, the crowd erupts and sings, ‘We are one, we are many’?” he said.

‘What’s wrong with that song?

“If people just sang that song when they started the Welcome to Country ceremony and drowned it out, that would probably be better than booing.”

Newman, 77, has regularly courted controversy over racial issues since entering the media after a successful 16-year playing career with Geelong Cats.

As one of the presenters of Nine’s The Footy Show, he caused outrage when he donned blackface to impersonate Indigenous player Nicky Winmar on live TV.

In his own podcasts he branded George Floyd, who sparked the Black Lives Matter riots in the US after being killed by police, as a “piece of shit”.

After last year’s AFL grand final, he lashed out at the match’s eulogy for Indigenous icon Uncle Jack Charles, labeling him a “heroin-addicted Indigenous thug”.

He has also railed against the Voice to Parliament, saying Indigenous Australians “have no history” and were not the country’s first people.

Speaking in his own You Cannot Be Serious podcast earlier this week, he said Australians should shout out or slowly clap their hands at every Welcome to Country ceremony.

“We don’t want to tolerate it,” he told fellow AFL legend co-host Don Scott. ‘We will not allow ourselves to be patronized.’

He said it started “from a completely innocent introduction by Ernie Dingo a few years ago and people have stuck with it” and unashamedly admitted it was “rude” to express it.

The comments sparked a bitter reaction, with AFL chief executive Gil McLachlan condemning the remarks and rejecting any attempt to scrap the ceremony.

“I’m not going to dignify these kinds of individual reactions in the community other than to say that I strongly disagree with it,” McLachlan said Thursday.

“I think the Welcome to Country in the final series and the national anthem have been significantly respected. People stand, they clap, they feel involved.

“It rolls into the national anthem and then it rolls into the beginning of our game. It’s a brilliant part of our game now.”

Hours later, Newman changed his tone from booing when speaking to The Opposition podcast and shrugged off claims he was racist.

“No one can tell you what the definition of a racist is,” he emphasized. “Racism is about hate…I get along with every indigenous people I’ve ever met.

‘I don’t know why this is being brought to the race.

“It’s just chilling to stand up and have someone welcome you to the country you’ve been to, who is younger than you in the first place, whether it’s aunt someone or uncle someone else.

“These people are enjoying the spoils of a life that began in this country when the settlement took place in the mid-1870s, or whenever that happened, and everyone has prospered.

‘Some who are white don’t, some who are black don’t. Adversity affects everyone – you don’t have to be a different skin color to know what adversity means.

“But if we all stopped dividing each other on those lines and came together….”

The song, I Am Australian, was written in 1987 by Bruce Woodley of The Seekers and Dobe Newton of The Bushwhackers, and is often referred to as Australia’s other national anthem.

It was used by the Salvation Army’s TV advertisement for their Red Shield Appeal in 1996 and by the 1999 Republican movement for their referendum campaign.

A version by Judith Durham of The Seekers, Russell Hitchcock of Air Supply and Mandawuy Yunupingu of Yothu Yindi reached number 17 on the ARIA charts in 1997.

It is also used in Telstra TV ads for their high-profile campaigns during the 2003 Rugby World Cup and the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Newman said singing We Are One was “about the most anti-racist thing you can get.”

‘How many times a day should I be welcomed into the country? “I live in it,” he said.

‘Stop telling us that we are welcome in our country, when we are. We should be welcome.”

He added: ‘What’s going on? Why doesn’t someone say, wait a minute, this is so offensive. It’s just insulting.

‘It is humiliating to have to look at this feigned virtuosity, this guilt that we have somehow stolen land.

‘What does that mean? The stolen land. There was nothing here before someone arrived and did something with it.”